Romancing the Pain - Part 18
Title: Romancing the Pain
Rating: MA-15 (for violence)
Pairing: Pepa/Silvia
Summary: Post episode 104 as well as my last fic, Come Back to Me. It’s basically its sequel; the events that occur after Silvia was released from the hospital.
A/N: Next chapter’s up for those still interested. Sorry if it’s a little untidy, I’m having a busy weekend; lots of assignments due next week. Anyway, happy reading.
ROMANCING THE PAIN - Part 18
One Week Later
Silvia walked into the precinct, the perfect imitation of a zombie. Her vibrant porcelain skin had taken on a sallow quality she was so thin that her skin struggled to stretch across her skeletal frame. The redhead’s face was a pasty gray; cheeks hollowed in with eyes sunken to the back of her head. She looked like hell...and then some.
A hush fell over the precinct as Silvia passed through the metal detector; the abrupt silence that blanketed the building was so thick that it bordered on suffocating. Every set of eyes fell onto the forensics inspector as she made her way to the lab; her booted feet dragging itself along the floor in a fashion that suggested that it could barely lift itself let alone support Silvia’s weight, light as it were with her inability to choke down even the tiniest morsels of food. However, her legs moved because Silvia willed them to; it only resulted that each step looked more agonized than the last.
A collective sigh escaped the staff as Silvia rounded the corner and disappeared, oblivious to the stares. The tension that permeated the atmosphere when she entered the building however, remained. Shoulders were unconsciously rigid, faces grimmer than grim and there were no pairs of eyes that did not reflect concern or worry. The entire precinct knew of the current situation and were all deeply affected. As much as they bickered and fought, they were a family. And when a member of that family was kidnapped by the mafia and tortured, the evidence sent daily in the form of a photograph, it only served to create a quiet yet palpable psychological hysteria.
Those on the case to locate the abducted agent looked more haggard than the other members of staff, understandably so. Their weary appearance was added on by the fact that it had been over a week of desperately trying to find Pepa’s location. Over a week of coming up with nothing; locating Pepa’s car had been futile. The mafia left nothing for them to find. The pictures had also proven useless, not that Silvia did not try. The room Pepa was held in was so sparsely decorated and simple that it could have been any storage room in any warehouse. Those on the case had made a list of all the warehouses in and around San Antonio and had combed each one with a fine tooth comb. Only to come back with nothing.
In short, agents and inspectors alike were left with the ugly reality that the mafia had called their bluff. They were winning and they knew it.
*************
Pepa was chained to the floor, face and belly pressed to the cold hard ground. Her arms and legs were shackled via chains to metal rings installed into the walls. Pepa’s face was a mess: discoloration from a terrifying assortment of bruises adorned almost every inch of skin. What was not a mass of green, blue, black and purple was painted red and reddish brown from cuts that sobbed blood from yawning wounds. A particularly angry cut on Pepa’s eyebrow bled freely; a lazy rivulet of dark red color trailing down past her swollen eye to streak her cheek. A nasty gash on Pepa’s left cheek had crusted over with infection; pus seeped from the puckered lips the split skin made, irritating the thin piece of scab that repeatedly tried to cover the gaping wound only to be broken open by more pus.
It was painfully obvious to Pepa, who could barely stay conscious for more than a few minutes at a time, that the mafia’s tormentors knew she was a lost cause. Despite their administrations and her “talks” with El Gordo, Pepa had offered them nothing of substance. Nothing except for grunts as blows rained her body, screams of pain and endless litanies of curses that could make a sailor blush. Now, after a week, they stopped patching her up, stopped holding back. They simply let the wounds bleed, infection to set in after leaving Pepa tied to the dirty floor for days and bones to crack under their “care”. Pepa knew that now, they merely tortured her for their amusement and pleasure.
The brunette was literally snapped out of her dazed musings as the bullwhip licked at her already abused back. Pepa screamed hoarsely as the end of the whip flayed off another sliver of skin, cutting into her back muscles, tearing into soft tissue. Her back was a mess of crisscross lines, some shallow, others deep and angry. Blood flowed from the roadmap of lines the whip had made out of her back; it dried and hardened in some areas whilst the fresher wounds leaked out blood from the open skin.
A whimper escaped Pepa as her torturer sprinkled salt onto her back; it was enough to make her cuts hiss in retaliation as the grains of salt that touched upon damaged skin and tissue ripped into exposed nerve endings with ferocity. It chewed at her nerves with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth and saliva that had the pH level of acid. It made her nerves howl with pain, pain that courses through her veins, ensuring that Pepa feel every drop of it.
Nevertheless, it was the splash of seawater onto the entire length of her cut up back that tore all that pain in her bloodstream out of her mouth in one horrific collective anguished scream. A scream that reverberated all over that small storage, making the peeling paint drooping from the walls want to flinch in response.
“It’s so very rewarding to see that my going to all that trouble of mixing that salt water had not gone to waste.”
El Gordo sat on a chair in the corner. The way he watched Pepa get tortured was akin to watching an infomercial on TV. He jiggled a leg that was crossed over the other and hummed a tune carelessly, acting like this was an everyday normal occurrence. He paused only to instruct the torturer to continue; smiling at the man in a way a father smiled at his son that had done him proud. The man holding the whip, stained red with Pepa’s blood, complied. With a grim smile that was nowhere near friendly, he raised his arm and brought the whip back down.
************
Sara walked into the lab just in time to catch Silvia opening the thin brown envelope. She launched forward and snatched it out of her aunt’s frail fingers, earning a withered glare from the redhead. Sara stood firm, holding the envelope behind her. “No, tita. You can’t keep looking at this.” Sara assessed her aunt, observing her fragile state that bordered on unhealthy.
Silvia ran a hand through her hair and growled. “Sara, give me that fuckin’ envelope,” she snarled. She reached over to grab it from Sara’s grip only to have Sara move away. Silvia stumbled, a slight dizzy spell overtaking her balance. She gripped the table for support, shaking her head to dispel the black spots that danced in front of her eyes.
Sara approached her aunt, a worried frown creasing her face. “Silvia?” She reached up a hand to brush back wisps of dull copper hair when her aunt suddenly spun around, and whipped the envelope out of her hands, pushing Sara away when she got it. “Joder! Silvia, give that back to me!” Sara attempted to reach for the envelope again but was suddenly rooted to the spot when Silvia pulled out her gun and trained on her niece. Sara stared at the weapon, then at her aunt in shock.
The arm holding the gun was steady as Silvia’s other hand snicked open the envelope and lifted the flap, fingers digging inside to pull out the photograph of Pepa. All the while empty, disconnected eyes remained fixed on Sara. When the picture was finally lying out in the open, Silvia re-holstered her gun and focused on the picture. Pepa was lying on the floor, arms and legs chained to either wall that faced each other. The bound woman’s wrists were bloody and chaffed from the restraints, from what she could see of Pepa’s face, it was puffy, bruised and cut almost beyond recognition. A small metal table with an assortment of tools ranging from a bullwhip to a riding crop of a thin bamboo cane lay proudly on display. Silvia felt bile rise up in her throat as she realized that those tools were more than likely going to be used on her wife.
The redhead was startled when Sara seized the photo from the table and began ripping it to pieces. Silvia watched unemotionally, unfeeling as Sara ranted and tore into her. She moved out of Sara’s reach when her niece attempted to hug her and brushed past her to get started on her daily ritual of combing through ways of finding Pepa. She ignored the concerned gaze from her niece as she settled in front of her computer.
****************
Five Hours Later
Pepa was tied back to her chair, her back inflamed with pain as the cuts protested and hollered their objection to being in such close proximity to a plank of wood, surface covered with sandpaper. As each punch descended onto her pummeled body, the momentum caused her back to scrape agonizingly against the sandpaper, flaring up the wounds on her back. Her shirt barely clung to her front as it but the friction from the sandpaper was eating away the last shreds of material of the back of her shirt and it was simply a matter of time before the tattered piece of clothing fell away.
The brunette screamed out as her torturer yanked brutally at her tied arm, near dislocating her shoulder and making her cracked and broken ribs throb. She heard him laugh sadistically into her ear before boxing her in the side of the head. She saw stars and felt a trickle of something warm escape her ear. Must be blood. The ringing in her ears, combined with the excruciating pain from her back almost rendered her unconscious but something caught her attention. She jerked her arm, the one the brute had purposely pulled. Could it be?
Pepa wriggled that arm despite the ache from her abused shoulder. For the first time in over a week, a tired smile graced her lip, though that smile never reached her eyes. Eyes that were slightly wild but more than a little haunted. But Pepa smiled because...the rope that tied her hands had loosened a knot.